Why Gay Men Don’t Need Feminism – Part 4: Brotherhood

‘Why Gay Men Don’t Need Feminism’ is a four-part series of articles adapted from a speech that was intended to be presented at the Second International Conference on Men’s Issues in 2015 by the author, Matthew Lye (a.k.a. Andy Bob). The four parts are:

As these articles are written from the perspective of a Men’s Human Rights Activist (MHRA), they focus on the dysfunctional relationship between feminism and gay men. Feminism has had an entirely different relationship with lesbians which is irrelevant to this topic, and has been examined in detail elsewhere.

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Demonizing individuals and organizations engaged in promoting the rights and welfare of men and boys is one of the key tactics employed by feminists to silence their dissenting voices, and to prevent men of all sexual orientations from uniting against them in the spirit of shared purpose and brotherhood. It is essential to expose how feminists do this, and examine some of the damage it has caused.

In June, 2015 Pride Toronto [1] announced that it had decided to uphold the ban it had placed the previous year [2] on an organization focused on assisting men in crisis called the Canadian Association for Equality (CAFE) [3] on marching in its annual parade, adding that CAFE would be permanently banned from all future Pride Toronto activities. Pride Toronto’s dispute resolution arbitrator, Paul Bent, released a statement explaining the decision:

“I considered CAFE’s response that inclusion, diversity and equality are values the organization shares with Pride versus the numerous complaints filed against CAFE’s participation arguing that CAFE, as an organization and through its affiliation with men’s rights groups, contravenes Pride Toronto’s vision to, ‘create a safe space to engage communities in the celebration of their sexuality.” [4]

Bent did not explain how CAFE’s participation in any of Pride Toronto’s activities could possibly pose any kind of threat to the safety of the colourfully-attired gay men and women who like to parade themselves at such events. Nor did he offer any details of the alleged “numerous complaints” that led to CAFE’s ousting. The online magazine, Vice, managed to track down the source of these complaints to a disgruntled Toronto feminist who operates under the pseudonym, Emma R: “It all began when she started a Facebook event urging people to speak up after realizing that there was a very real possibility CAFE could be permitted to march in this year’s Pride parade.” [4] Emma R proudly explains:

“I created the Facebook event right before I went to bed and when I woke up in the morning, over 1000 people had joined and confirmed that they they’d submitted complaints to Toronto Pride’s executive director Mathieu Chantelois.” [4]

It is worth noting that Pride Toronto’s board of directors formalized the ban against CAFE only two weeks after Emma R’s created her late-night Facebook event without offering a single shred of evidence to support complainants’ assertions that CAFE posed a credible thread to parade participants. Predictably, Emma R did not offer any evidence either, only her feelings – and her feminist-driven desire to perpetuate false threat narratives about any organization concerned with the rights and welfare of men and boys: “My motivation for spearheading this was around comfort… So to have a group that has such a demonstrated history of making people feel uncomfortable, [it] is just asinine to me that they would want to take part.” [4] Emma R did not feel the need to explain why the idea of helping men in crisis made her feel “uncomfortable”.

Vice journalist, Neha Chandrachud, cites the fact that there are no “queer initiatives or programming” on CAFE’s website in order to support her doubts about “the sincerity of CAFE’s commitment to the LGBTQ community.” Like many critics of the Men’s Human Rights Movement [MHRM], Chandrachud does not grasp the concept that CAFE, like A Voice for Men, is not a gay rights organization, but an organization which concerns itself with issues such as suicide, mental health, domestic violence, fathers’ rights and chivalry justice, that can affect the rights and welfare of all men and boys.

As a committed feminist, [5] Chadrachud is keen to promote the fallacy that “queer advocacy and men’s rights are ideological opponents” in order to create division among men of different sexual orientations, and to disguise the fact that the only ideological opponents to men’s rights within and around LGBT organizations like Pride Toronto are feminists like herself and Emma R.

A major obstacle to these feminists is the existence of the many gay and bisexual men and women who actively support men’s human rights organizations like CAFE and A Voice for Men. Naturally, Chandrachud chose not to consult any of these people, many of whom would have been more than happy for an opportunity to explain why they identify as Men’s Human Rights Activists [MHRAs], support the goals of egalitarian organizations like CAFE and A Voice for Men and share their many evidence-based reasons why feminism should be repudiated as a bigoted and destructive ideology that actively undermines the rights and welfare of men and boys – a demographic that includes gay and bisexual men.

Some gay MHRAs, like this author, would have even provided her with photographic examples to what gay men should do when confronted with a feminist who is trying to convince him that he is a woman-rejecting member of ‘the patriarchy’ who benefits from unearned privilege which he uses to oppress women by promoting ‘rape culture’, maintaining wage gaps and making feminists ‘uncomfortable’ by challenging their manufactured statistics, exposing their corruption, debunking their false threat narratives and denouncing their anti-male hate-mongering:

No, Chandrachud doesn’t consult any gay MHRAs. She consults anti-MHRA feminist, Emma R, who, while acknowledging that “men have it really hard in a number of areas”, takes the opportunity to demonize the MHRM through a variety of frequently-employed feminist methods, such as conflating ‘feminism’ with ‘women’ and claiming that MHRAs accuse feminists/women of not merely exacerbating men’s problems, but creating them: “But I think that instead of addressing these problem, the men’s rights movement is scapegoating feminism and scapegoating women as the cause of their problems.” Conflating ‘women’ with ‘feminists’ conveniently ignores the fact that not all women are feminists and not all feminists are women, but it enables feminists to label any criticism of feminism as an attack on women. Feminists never tire of conjuring up misogyny that doesn’t exist.

Emma R also uses the feminist method of reiterating a slight variation on Gloria Steinem’s attempt to force an alliance between feminism and the gay rights movement when Steinem claimed that they were, “completely the same thing”. [6] “The struggles of women and the queer community may not be exactly the same, but they overlap. Feminism is a queer issue.” [4] Conflating ‘feminism’ with ‘gay rights’ implies that the MHRM’s antithetical position to feminism is an indirect attack on gay rights. Feminists create these kinds of semantic contortions because it leaves so many potential critics fatigued and bewildered from the tedious effort required to unravel them.

Predictably, Emma R cannot resist invoking feminism’s most potent tactic of manufacturing false threat narratives when she demonizes the MHRM by suggesting that it poses some kind of imminent danger to women and girls: “…the thing is that the men’s rights movement isn’t just about a crazy opinion, they’re people with a demonstrated history of doxing women and perpetuating violence.”

Like all totalitarian ideologies, feminism cannot withstand close scrutiny – it crumbles beneath the weight of its own logically fallacious hypocrisy and the faulty premises upon which it is built. No movement has threatened feminism’s cultural and legal hegemony with a greater barrage of sustained, evidence-based criticism than the ever-expanding MHRM. Feminists are becoming increasingly alarmed by this criticism and have reacted the way totalitarians invariably do by attempting to silence it in a concerted campaign of demonization propaganda. They’re not widely-referred to as ‘feminazis’ for nothing.

Falsely accusing individuals and organizations within the MHRM of threatening feminists with retributive violence and harassment taps into society’s gynocentric instincts to protect women and revile those who seek to do them harm – which, according to feminists, includes making them feel ‘uncomfortable’ – by debunking their endless litany of lies and copious use of anti-male shaming language. [7]

These false threat accusations are made against critics of feminism, like the MHRM, with such alarming frequency that it is necessary to examine some of them in order to prompt gay male feminists into asking themselves why they have chosen to align with a movement that goes to such morally corrupt extremes to shut down discussions about issues that can devastatingly impact their own lives. Hopefully, gay men will think twice about marching cheek-by-jowl with these reprehensible frauds the next time they are roped in to assisting feminists in their efforts to shut down such discussions – as they attempted to do in 2014, just prior to the First International Conference on Men’s Issues in Detroit, U.S.A.

Gay men helping their feminist “allies” to protest a conference addressing issues that negatively affect their own rights and welfare.

“The absolute last thing we need is a group coming in that is known for threatening women with rape, torture and murder, and for being rape apologists who make violent threats against courthouses and other official city buildings…On June 7 [2014], union workers, feminists, leaders in the LGBTQ community [and] queer activists…gathered at Detroit’s Grand Circus Park. Protestors carrying signs that read, “Misogyny Kills,” “Blame the System, Not the Victim,”…quickly spread across the park. The sponsorship of the event came from across the political spectrum, including Gay/Bi/Trans men’s groups…” [8]

The only evidence of violence in the lead up to the conference was that promised by feminists and their sympathizers. The most egregious examples of this violence were the threats made to the original conference venue, Detroit’s Doubletree Downtown Hilton, forcing conference organizers to change locations at the last minute. [9] Emma Howland-Bolton supported the call to violence by organizing protests that encouraged some of her followers to make grossly inappropriate comments, including: “Trigger warning – these people [MHRAs] make me trigger-happy.” [10] Another opined that the best way to protest was to actually attend the conference and “storm it”.

Howland-Bolton was rightly admonished by conference presenter, Jonathan Taylor, who suggested in an open letter on his website, A Voice for Male Students, that she adopt a more responsible approach to her protest activities. [11] Howland-Bolton responded by complaining to Ms Magazine’s Anji Becker Stevens that Taylor was targeting her “in classic MRA fashion.” [12] In an email to Becker Stevens, Howland-Bolton made it clear that she did not intend to take any responsibility for her actions by writing:

“When A Voice for Men started targeting me…I was flabbergasted…But I guess it’s not surprising that they acted in such an irrational manner. Sexism is irrational. Misogyny is irrational. So a male supremacist hate group like A Voice for Men that embraces sexism and misogyny is also going to be irrational. You cannot connect to reality if your beliefs are predicated on the assumption that, simply by virtue of your gender, you are superior to another person.”

Predictably, Becker Stevens sympathized with Howland-Bolton, even going so far as accuse A Voice for Men/Male Students of being, “hard at work harassing and threatening women,” [12] and that Howland-Bolton’s protest deserved to be , “held in as safe of spaces as possible – safe from both physical harm and emotional trauma.” [12] Becker Stevens did not reveal whether or not she believed that conference participants, like Jonathan Taylor, were entitled to the same protection, but she did manage to strongly imply that the feminist threats to the original conference venue were fabricated by A Voice for Men founder, Paul Elam, despite irrefutable evidence to the contrary. [13] One feminist even dismissed the evidence as, “the kind of vicious tactics that AVfM has used to derail and trivialize the response to [its] own ideology.” [14]

Neither of these feminists accepted Paul Elam’s cordial invitation to, “Buy a ticket, come in and have a seat and let us help you earn your way out of ignorance,” [15] preferring to tow the feminist line by coddling their imaginary fears about the MHRM and perpetuating feminism’s imaginary threat narratives.

The manner in which feminist activists attempted to shut down Dr Warren Farrell’s presentation addressing the issue of male suicide at the University of Toronto in 2012

[16] has been examined in detail elsewhere, [17] particularly the shrill antics of the aggressively appalling Chany Binx, who responded to hearing about the tragic increase in male suicide rates by warbling, ‘Cry Me a River’. [18] Less well known is the fact that Binx responded to being called out on her callous and disruptive behavior by damseling as demurely as her abrasive demeanour would allow:

“Because I had the audacity to tell a dude to STFU [that ‘dude’ was Dan Perrins, a respected Canadian MHRA whose beloved brother committed suicide], [19] an MRA no less, I have since been the target of not only just online misogyny (as if that’s a surprise) but cyberstalking, rape and death threats…” [20]

Feminists were quick to defend Binx for suffering such horrors as being compared to Pennywise the clown [21] and having total strangers indicate that they were sickened by her mockery of male suicide victims. Feminist playwright, Sabina England, was outraged that people were offended by Binx’s lack of empathy: “The MRAs, they had their stupid little seminar interrupted. Awh, boo hoo. Obviously that is just SUCH a big deal.” [22] England interpreted the widespread condemnation of Binx as, “a serious reminder that women are not safe anywhere.” [22] These committed feminists exhibit the same level of empathy that all feminists have for men in pain.

A feminist takes a well-earned break from being empathetic to men in pain.

Feminist media pundits and academics are not above making false claims of violent harassment and abuse in the wake of being exposed to dissenting voices, as gay feminist critic Milos Yiannopoulos discovered after he unnerved Dr Emily Grossman with facts and logic in a televised debate in July, 2015: [23] “One of the most frustrating things about debating feminists and feminist academics is how readily they reach for words such as ‘harassment’, ‘abuse’ and ‘safety’ – particularly when they are losing the argument.”

Yiannopoulos read a Tweet that Grossman had posted following the debate: “Absolutely reeling from the misogynistic backlash my debate has received. Hadn’t quite realized the extent of #everydaysexism. Wow.” By that point, Yiannopoulos had learned to be suspicious of feminist claims of online harassment. Comedienne, Kate Smuthwaite, had made similar claims after she lost her temper during a debate with Yiannopoulos: “FFS this is probably the worst online barrage of online misogyny I’ve ever faced…It’s horrible”. However, when pressed, Smuthwaite couldn’t produce more than two examples of this “barrage”.

Yiannopoulos and a fellow researcher decided to investigate Grossman’s claims and found that, of the 567 Tweets Grossman had received, many were supportive, many challenged her debate performance, many were critical of her position, a few were slightly mean-spirited, but none were outright misogynistic or abusive: “Our conclusion was that her claims were unfounded.” Yiannopoulos echoed the sentiments of many MHRAs by observing:

“To those of us watching feminists and feminist academics, it can be tough to escape the conclusion that they deploy the word ‘misogyny’ simply to indicate disagreement, and perhaps as a signal to white knights that they need backup because their arguments are failing.” [23]

Feminists, like Anita Sarkeesian, [24] Danielle D’Etremont [25] and the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Toronto [26] have all alleged, or at least implied, to have been victims of MHRA-perpetrated violence, harassment, cyberbullying, and even terrorism. Feminists make these allegations faster than the law enforcement officials who investigate them can dismiss them, which they invariably do, as lacking credibility. Police and FBI officials usually refrain from suggesting that feminists fabricate these threats themselves, which is what University of Wyoming ‘rape culture’ promoter, Meg Lankers-Simon was caught doing in May, 2013. [27]

Meg Lankers-Simon explains why men are the problem at the ‘Take Back the Night Rally’ she organized after threatening to rape herself.

It isn’t enough for feminists to drag dimpled doe-eyed darlings, like Emma Watson, before U.N assemblies to urge men to stop caring about themselves and each other in order to focus exclusively on fulfilling feminist agendas. [28] Nor are they satisfied with identifying Isla Visa mass shooter, Elliot Rodger, as being either a MHRA – or like a MHRA – in article [29] after article [30] after article [31], despite the fact that he had no connection whatsoever to the MHRM, or made any reference at all to any of the issues addressed by the MHRM, even in his 140-page manifesto. Feminists may as well cite Daffy Duck or Pick-up Artist [PUA] guru, Roosh V, for all the relevance Rodger has to the MHRM. But cite him they do – every chance they get.

Feminists have now launched an international campaign to silence their critics by attempting to shut down MHR sites like A Voice for Men, and are using the U.N to help them. [33] Failed British Labour Party leader candidate, Yvette Cooper, has even characterized the growing antagonism towards feminist bigotry and corruption as bullying, online harassment and misogynistic abuse which is “increasingly masquerading as political activism” and, predictably, dangerous to women. She warns:

“Unless misogyny on the Internet is challenged, more women’s voices will be silenced, and more women will be oppressed or feel prevented from speaking out just as if we’ve gone back to the Victorian age. We cannot let that happen.” [34]

Yet again, a feminist is conflating ‘women’ with ‘feminists’ in order to create an illusion of rampant misogyny, perpetuate the myth that MHRAs yearn for a return to traditional gender roles – something which is anathema to the vast majority of MHRAs, especially those at A Voice for Men [35] – and to signal to those white knights previously mentioned by Milos Yianopoulos to come riding to the rescue.

It never occurs to Cooper that it is she who is trying to silence women’s voices: women like Dr Tara Palmatier of A Shrink for Men, [36] erudite anti-feminist videographer Karen Straughan (a.k.a. GirlWritesWhat), [37] dedicated men’s rights activists like Suzanne McCarley, [38] Jasmin Newman [39] and Hannah Wallen, a MHRA who pithily observed that:

“…feminists are claiming that their experience of having ideological beliefs about women’s lives is a more valid description of us than our own experience of living them. They use that claim to treat any resistance to them as an attack, rather than a defense against a presumptuous violation of personal boundaries.” [40]

These are just a few of the many women who care so much about the men and boys in their lives, and those who aren’t, that they have added their eloquent voices to the MHRM, often at great personal risk from feminists who uniformly vilify them as gender traitors for daring to publicly reject bigoted feminist orthodoxy and insisting that men and boys deserve to have their issues addressed openly, honestly and compassionately. These are the women that feminists like Yvette Cooper want to silence.

More importantly, these women are welcomed into the MHRM, where they are greatly appreciated and respected. In stark contrast, feminist men are routinely shunned within the feminist movement – as James Ritchie discovered when he was removed from his elected position as Women’s Officer at the University of Tasmania in Australia after the University of Tasmania’s Women’s Collective launched a petition which expressed its outrage that Ritchie was unaware of his proper place. Apparently, Ritchie made the mistake of taking Emma Watson’s call for “male leadership in addressing women’s issues” at face value. [41] Hopefully, he has learned his lesson, and is now suspicious of feminist claims made by waif-like actresses dressed in virginal white who once looked cute wearing pointy hats.

In fairness, not all feminists are entirely unsympathetic to men like James Ritchie:

A feminist offers proof to a skeptical world that she is not a man-hater.

At what point will gay men who identify as feminists begin wondering why feminists are so determined to demonize the MHRM and shut down any discussion by or about men that are not monitored and supervised by feminists? How many false threat narratives about the MHRM have to unravel like cheap suits under the slightest scrutiny in order for gay men who identify as feminists to put aside their listen-and-believe feminist indoctrination long enough to realize that feminists are not remotely interested in addressing issues that affect them as men? When will gay male feminists start asking themselves why feminists have gone to such deceitful extremes to frighten them away from a movement that actually does address their issues as men? These questions are impossible to answer with any certainty, but that point will probably be the moment when gay male feminists finally get sick of reading offensive tripe like this:

“He may be oppressed in some ways as a gay man, but he’s still a man, and therefore a member of a group with the greatest social power, a member of a group which institutionally oppresses women. Gay men may be oppressed in some ways, but they also benefit from the structures which advantage men over women…So yes, gay men need feminism. But that means they have a duty to feminism- they have a duty to think about their own sexism, their own misogyny, their own perpetuation of harmful standards…And then they should come and help the feminist movement.” [42]

To quote the late Dorothy Parker, “..it was at this point that Tonstant Weader fwowed up.” [43] That’s exactly what gay men need to do: ‘fwow up’ the feminist dogma that has always accused them of being as equally culpable as their straight brothers in an imaginary patriarchy that systemically privileges them and oppresses women, and has always demanded that they reject their male identities in order to fulfil their feminist duties as third-rate ‘auxiliary women’. Gay male feminists need to purge themselves of their feminist indoctrination before they can re-evaluate their male identities, and acknowledge that the MHRM addresses issues that are relevant to them in a way that feminism does not, never has and never will.

To highlight this point, it is interesting to note that prominent male feminist, Jon Greenberg, prefers to post public apologies for what he imagines to be his male privileges rather than address any issues that are actually relevant to the rights and welfare of men and boys. [44] His top seven ‘patriarchal benefits’ are:

1) I have the privilege of a short morning routine

2) I have the privilege of a gender that confers authority

3) I have the privilege of easy bathroom access – even when there are no bathrooms

4) I have the privilege to show skin

5) I have the privilege to move about without fear of harassment, assault or rape

6) I have the privilege to enjoy the Internet without my gender being assaulted

7) I have the privilege of seeing myself widely and positively represented in the media

That’s right: feminism has convinced Greenberg that men don’t get harassed, raped, assaulted, cyber-bullied or ridiculed in the media – and that men should feel guilty about being able to urinate while standing up and remove their tank-tops at the beach. Anyone wondering if feminists responded to this by posting articles about the evils of ‘mansplaining’ ought to know the answer to that by now. [45]

In stark contrast to feminism, the MHRM isn’t concerned about a man’s sexuality any more than it is concerned about whatever points of ‘intersectionality’ he may or may not possess – though it certainly recognizes how these points might affect his experience as a man. The MHRM’s principal concern is the range of issues which can, and frequently do, impact the lives of all men – issues which feminists routinely ignore, minimize, deny and even ridicule.

One such topic is male suicide. Dr Augustine J. Kposowa of the University of California discovered that in the United States, men were 4.8 times more likely to commit suicide than women, and that this rate more than doubled among men undergoing divorce or marital separation. [46] Experts have observed that men are far less likely to discuss the problems which cause the depression which often leads to suicide or to seek help from support services. [46] As male suicide is on the increase, gay male feminists should be pondering why University of Toronto feminists attempted to violently prevent Dr Warren Farrell from discussing some of those problems – one of which is the difficulty many gay teenaged boys have in accepting their sexuality; and to ostracize CAFE – one of whose goals is to provide support services for suicidal men and boys on university campuses throughout Canada – by staging protests designed to thwart its efforts.

Every independent (i.e.: non-feminist) study of domestic violence concludes that male victims of female-perpetrated domestic violence are far from being the statistically-negligible minority that feminists invariably claim them to be:

“According to a 2010 national survey by the Centers for Disease Control and U.S. Department of Justice, in the last 12 months more men than women were victims of intimate partner physical violence and over 40% of severe physical violence was directed at men…Despite this, few services are available to male victims of intimate partner violence…More research is needed on IPV against men, its impact on men and the domestic violence service response to male victims. Public education is needed on the extent of IPV against males, and services need to be provided for these victims.” [47]

This study, by Bert H. Hoff of the University of Phoenix, recommends that, “State programs need to ensure that domestic violence services be provided to men across the state,” and that, “Public education efforts…should be specifically addressed to women and girls as well as men and boys.” [47] But this does not happen in Arizona, or, indeed, anywhere else. What does happen, is that feminist academics and activists demand that governments apply their ‘Duluth Model’ of domestic violence – a model which concludes that men cannot be victims of domestic violence because they belong to the oppressor class known as ‘the patriarchy’, the same binary paradigm in which women are the oppressed class and therefore, incapable of being perpetrators [48] – to all legislation and social policy, thus eliminating both the existence of male victims and the need to provide them with adequate support services in one fell swoop. This is certainly what happens in Australia. [49]

A feminist helps men by defining their rights for them.

Gay men who are victims of domestic violence receive no more sympathy or support than their male counterparts. [50] The only advice they are given, even from gay rights organizations like the StoneWall Society Webring, is to call domestic violence hotlines and hope for the best. [51] Perhaps this is when they will discover what Hoff meant when he said that one of the problems with the ‘Duluth Model’ is that it is “based on ideology, not science”; [52] or to put it in visual terms:

Suicide and domestic violence are just two of the many issues that gay men share with their straight brothers and are addressed by men’s rights organizations like A Voice for Men and A Voice for Male Students. Other issues include, the boy crisis in education, [53] chivalry justice, [54] male genital integrity, [55] false rape allegations and the erosion of due process rights for men; [56] and, for those gay male feminists who think that the injustice of the family court system could never impact them, think again. [57]

These issues are explored in-depth at A Voice for Men, [58] which welcomes [59] anyone with a genuine concern for the rights and welfare of men and boys and who wants to offer suggestions about viable, non-violent solutions to the many problems currently confronting men and boys. That welcome is not extended to feminists who, as documented throughout this series of articles, are only interested in promoting their ideological dogma, fallacious myths about ‘the patriarchy’, feminist-manufactured statistics and their endless array of false threat narratives designed to hamper the efforts of activists who truly believe – as feminists decidedly do not – that men’s and women’s rights are equally important.

As they have made abundantly clear over the decades, feminists have delighted in exploiting the divide that has historically existed between men of different sexual orientations to ensure that they maintain the fear and loathing that prevents them from uniting in opposition against feminist ideology which seeks to undermine the rights and welfare of every man and boy. Feminists do not want gay men to perceive themselves as men first, as feminists undoubtedly do, but as a kind of underclass of default women, whom they expect to participate in feminism’s ideological mission of demonizing straight men, and their ‘toxic masculinity’, as the cause of every one of the real and imagined problems confronting women and gay men – and punishing them by accordingly.

Gay male feminists who have been victimized by straight men have no right to hold MHRAs accountable for their experiences any more than feminists have the right to hold men accountable for the fact women were once restricted by assigned gender roles – which feminists presumptuously refer to as ‘oppression’ – while conveniently ignoring the fact that men, gay men included, were also restricted by the gender roles to which they were assigned.

Gay male feminists who harbour resentment against straight men need to be reminded that some straight men may also harbor some resentment about the fact that so many gay men have actively supported feminism – an ideology that has relentlessly targeted straight men for as long as many of them can remember. Mutual understanding and respect must cut both ways.

It is time to put resentments aside and unite in opposition with all men, and the women who love us, against an enemy which has always fed off our division. Feminism fears the day when men recognize each other’s right to express their masculinities however they choose, whether it be attending Sunday Service with the wife and kids or shaking their orange speedos atop a bedazzled float. It is doubtful that many will want to continue expressing it as disposable utilities for ideologues who despise them.

For those gay male feminists who are still dithering about whether or not they need feminism, consider the role that one feminist has so kindly carved out in her movement, especially for you. If feminism has not yet made you ‘fwow up’, perhaps this will do the trick:

“I’m ready to see more gay men on the feminist front lines…I want to imagine that someday, when I am dying of breast cancer (or whatever it may be), a loving gay man will change my bedpan, not simply because it’s his job, but because he’s part of the sisterhood, because he’s part of an honored tradition of queer and feminist care. I’ll see you then my friend.” [60]